Waymo Speeds Up
Next time you’re barreling down a highway and you get stuck behind someone driving at the speed limit, don’t honk or flash your lights. It might be a Waymo self-driving car! The Alphabet-owned robotaxi business announced Wednesday that its cars will now drive on freeways in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Phoenix, a major advance for the service. It’s a reminder that, while Elon Musk makes extravagant promises about the potential of Tesla’s robotaxi service, Waymo is actually living the dream.
Waymo has been operating in all three cities for quite a while, in addition to Atlanta and Austin, Texas, where its cars are available on the Uber service. It plans to expand to Dallas, Denver, Washington, Nashville, Tenn., Miami, San Diego and London next year, with several of those new markets operating through partners such as Avis or Lyft. That expansion should drastically accelerate the already rapid growth in paid rides. On Tuesday, Guggenheim Securities published a report partly based on new California DMV data estimating that Waymo had 4.3 million monthly rides overall in the third quarter, up from 3.5 million in the second quarter.
Can Tesla catch up? It still hasn’t taken a human safety driver out of its cars, although Musk said recently he hopes to remove that person from its cars in parts of Austin in the coming months. And as my colleague Theo Wayt reported recently, Tesla hasn’t yet applied for the permits required for robotaxi service in a couple of states where it plans to begin offering service soon. Presumably by some point in 2026, Tesla will expand the markets where it offers robotaxi service, perhaps without a human safety driver, putting it on an equal footing with Waymo. But by that point, the Alphabet-owned unit could be operating in even more markets.
Musk has a lot of incentive to make Tesla’s robotaxi a success. To collect his full $1 trillion pay package, Tesla has to put a million Tesla robotaxis into commercial operation. Anecdotally, the Tesla self-driving experience is on a par with Waymo’s, at least according to AI researcher Andrej Karpathy (a onetime top Tesla AI executive), who posted his views today on X. It’s possible Tesla could gain market share by undercutting Waymo on fares: Waymo’s cars, including the self-driving tech, are costly to produce—see this story for details. That translates into higher fares compared with Uber, at least. That should change soon, given that Waymo last year struck a deal to incorporate Hyundai vehicles in its fleet, which should bring down costs compared to the current Jaguar vehicles it currently uses. Then again, Tesla’s own studies suggest its robotaxi might never be profitable.